Seventy-five Years of Storied History About Political Conventions!

Our political conventions may be predictable and bland, but some of the writing they have inspired here has been groundbreaking. A look back through Esquire's archives.

Aug 4, 2008

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Terry Southern: "Grooving in Chi," Nov. 1968

Esquire sent Terry Southern, William Burroughs, and French writer Jean Genet to Chicago to cover the 1968 Democratic convention, where Eugene McCarthy faced party-backed Hubert Humphrey. The event drew thousands of protesters, including Allen Ginsberg, who were violently confronted by Mayor Richard Daley's police force.

Right after lunch we very dutifully piled into the car and headed for Convention Hall. It is exactly like approaching a military installation -- barbed-wire, checkpoints, the whole bit; Genet was absolutely appalled, I was afraid he was going to be physically sick; Burroughs, of course, was ecstatic; it was all so grotesque that at one point he actually did a little dance of glee.... We had one hell of a time actually getting admitted to the hall, despite all the proper credentials. Burroughs and I, of course, are veritable paragons of fashion and decorum -- but Ginsberg and Genet, it must be admitted, are pretty weird-looking guys. In any case the cluster of door cops took one look at our group -- which now included Michael Cooper, an English photographer with shoulder-length hair, a purple suit, and sandals -- and then simply turned away....

"Our accreditation is all in order, officer," snapped Esky's John Berendt, indicating the door passes around our necks.

"It is, huh?" said the lieutenant, not even bothering to look.

"How about his accreditation?" he said, pointing to Ginsberg, "is it in order too?" And he gave a derisive snort.

"It certainly is," said Berendt, "show him your pass, Allen."

The lieutenant...fixed on Cooper. "And he's got accreditation? Hell, he ain't even got any shoes!"

Norman Mailer: "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," Nov. 1960

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Esquire commissioned Mailer to report on the 1960 Democratic convention. He sent back this essay -- now regarded as a genre-changing classic.

Because if the boss is depressed, the delegate is doubly depressed, and the emotional fact is that Kennedy is not in focus, not in the old political focus, he is not comfortable; in fact it is a mystery to the boss how Kennedy got to where he is, not a mystery in its structures; Kennedy is rolling in money, Kennedy got the votes in primaries, and, most of all, Kennedy has a jewel of a political machine. It is as good as a crack Notre Dame team, all discipline and savvy and go-go-go, sound, drilled, never dull, quick as a knife, full of the salt of hipper-dipper, a beautiful machine; the boss could adore it if only a sensible candidate were driving it, a Truman, even a Stevenson, please God a Northern Lyndon Johnson, but it is run by a man who looks young enough to be coach of the Freshman team, and that is not comfortable at all. The boss knows political machines, he knows issues, farm parity, Forand health bill, Landrum-Griffin, but this is not all so adequate after all to revolutionaries in Cuba who look like beatniks, competitions in missiles, Negroes looting whites in the Congo, intricacies of nuclear fallout, and NAACP men one does well to call Sir. It is all out of hand, everything important is off the center, foreign affairs is now the lick of the heat, and senators are candidates instead of governors, a disaster to the old family style of political measure where a political boss knows his governor and knows who his governor knows. So the boss is depressed, profoundly depressed. He comes to this convention resigned to nominating a man he does not understand, or let us say that, so far as he understands the candidate who is to be nominated, he is not happy about the secrets of his appeal, not so far as he divines these secrets; they seem to have too little to do with politics and all too much to do with the private madnesses of the nation which had thousands -- or was it hundreds of thousands -- of people demonstrating in the long night before Chessman was killed, and a movie star, the greatest, Marlon the Brando out in the night with them. Yes, this candidate for all his record, his good, sound, conventional liberal record has a patina of that other life, the second American life, the long electric night with the fires of neon leading down the highway to the murmur of jazz.

Martin Amis:"Ronnie and the Pacemakers," Nov. 1988

The British take on America is something of a journalistic tradition, and in 1988 Amis was dispatched to the Republican convention to watch Ronald Reagan hand power to his successor.

All morning the hall had rung with the words of ardent glozers and fiery mediocrities, chosen for their sex or their skin color or their extremes of youth and age. Punctuated by the tinny clunk of the gavel, the clichés of the peanut-faced orators labored toward you at the speed of sound, chased by the PA echo.... Reagan got up there, and after one blooper ("Facts are stupid things" -- the crowd winced so fondly, so protectively!), a few jokes, several boasts, and a lot of statistics, shared with his countrymen the gift of the trust in a dream of a vision whose brilliant light in a shining moment showed a sweet day of extra love for a special person between the great oceans. "Here," he exhaustedly concluded, "it's a sunrise every day

Reagan's speech was an apotheosis of a kind: the rhetoric of arcadian green, polluted by reality. Nobody liked it much, even on the floor. Yet the momentum of expectation was so far entrained that the performance somehow passed off as a triumph. This had to be the night of rich catharsis, when Reagan's image began its slow wipe, leaving Bush to hurl his first grapple hook across the stature gap.

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